A major and well recognized drawback of serial communication networks such as the IEEE 802.5 Token Ring Network is the catastrophic network wide failure which takes place when any component in the network fails or some times worse still operates in degraded mode.
Much effort has gone into providing failure detection and network restoration devices and techniques. Many of these are identified in U.S. Pat. No. 5,132,962 issued Jul. 21, 1992 and assigned to the same assignee of this application. The device and the techniques disclosed in the 962 patent have proven very effective in detecting, isolating and restoring network operation.
Attempts have been made to simplify and or otherwise reduce the cost of the network. The instant invention resulted from one such attempt. It has due to its unique circuit design resulted in a substantial cost reduction over known existing designs and at the same time retained all of the essential performance requirements.